Observations from IBM's Enterprise2013 conference

IBM invited me to take part in Enterprise2013, an "Executive Summit," to learn about how their systems, software, and services can help organizations, in IBM's words:

...improve financial performance, enhance organizational
effectiveness and achieve industry leadership through IT infrastructure
investments to reshape their industries, improve customer service, make
better decisions through improved use of data, and enhance collaboration
across their value chains.

In short, IBM is offering a showcase for its Mainframe and Midrange systems offerings.

Musings before the conference begins

As I'm reading though the agenda and planning which sessions to
attend, I began thinking about how many system suppliers have one system
solution and present it as the best answer to any question.

In their view, their X86-based systems are exceptional at transaction
processing, high performance computing, Web-based applications,
collaborative computing and just about any application you'd care to
name.

While IBM offers a well received family of X86-based systems, it
would point out that maybe the industry is looking through the wrong end
of the telescope when starting with a microprocessor architecture in
its decision-making process. IBM is one of the few suppliers that offers
multiple families of systems, each based upon a different architecture,
and points out that it would be better to consider what you're trying
to accomplish before picking out an architecture.

IBM would suggest that an enterprise-wide IT architecture would be
better based upon a selection of industry and international standards,
application frameworks, applications, data management tools, management
tools, security tools, etc. that are available to support a number of
system architectures rather than starting with a type of hardware and
rolling that out everywhere, always and for all workloads.

Considering Industry Standard Systems

In the industry standard systems world, operating systems,
application frameworks and applications are designed to use a general
purpose, high volume X86 platform. The suppliers often choose to use the
lowest common denominator when selecting processor options, memory
capabilities, storage interfaces and the like to make sure that their
products will execute reasonably well on a broad selection of products
from many vendors. They try to innovate within standards promulgated by a
number of other suppliers.

While this approach means that an organization can select from a
number of suppliers, it may also mean that the solution may use more
power and require more cooling, more processors, more storage and be
less cost-effective than selecting a different platform.

Considering single vendor solutions

IBM and the others offering systems and solutions based upon several
different microprocessor architectures have an opportunity to tune their
solutions based upon the capabilities of their own processor, memory
architecture, storage architecture, operating systems, virtualization
technology, the storage and the networking tools. As long as each of the
family of systems closely follow international and industry standards
for operating system APIs, development tools, application frameworks,
and standards for data management, networking, and security the entire
configuration can be tuned and optimized for a specific use case.

This could mean making better use of the available processing,
memory, storage and networking power provided by a system. It can also
mean addressing the enterprise's IT challenges with a simpler, more
integrated, higher performance and yet lower cost solution.

Notes from the conference

I will be adding comments to this post from time to time while I'm at the conference. Please come back to read them.

8:00

Why do conferences always start with deafening music? IBM started the
conference general session with a live band playing with the sound set
to 11. I had to leave the room. It was just too painful to stay in my
chair.

Tom Rosimilia, SVP Systems and Technology GroupTom
spoke about out how technology and Big Data touches everyone's lives. He
discussed how mobility, Big Data, and social media are trends that are
hitting all at once. All of them are based on our technological
infrastructure. Companies are looking at technology as a way to be more
efficient, agile and, they hope, more profitable. Tom flogged the
idea of "Smarter Computing" and gave several examples of IBM's role. He
said that IT needs to transform to make better use of their systems and
data and reduce silos that get in the way. Open standards are required.
Getting people to think differently and collaborate is key.

Steve Mills, SVP, reviewed a number of topics including how
virtualization (he means the use of virtual machine software I think)
makes it possible to create a sustainable data center that balances
performance, power consumption, agility and other factors. It was an
interesting session.

10:00

Pablo Carvao, VP Noth American Systems and Technology Group

Carvela focused on how infrastructure matters to business outcomes.
The theme of "transforming IT" was mentioned again and again. Since he
was introducing the next series of sessions, he mentioned a number of
buzzwords in passing.

Jeanette Horran, IBM CIO

Horran discussed how IBM uses Big Data, Advanced Analytics, Cloud,
Social and Mobile in its own business. It currently has 86,000
communities, 428,000 blogs and over 100,000 personal devices connecting
to the IBM network. This allows the staff and contractors to work
together even though 40% of them never come into an IBM office.

Patrick Toole, General Manager System z

Toole started with a story about how the mainframe was a foundation
piece for many major innovations and events including the moon landings,
oceanographic research and the like. He pointed out that most people
don't think about the impact of IBM's 50 year history. Things happen so
fast and securely that we use these systems without thinking about it.

Toole then turned to how today's trends only reenforce the need for
these systems going forward. He talked about the legacy of the new X86
systems and how other approaches could be better in terms of costs,
complexity, power consumption and the like. The more workloads people
put on the mainframe, he pointed out, the better the economics look.

Conversations at lunch

I spoke with a couple of CIOs over lunch.

One of them discussed how his company had gathered together Linux
systems, largely supporting Web workloads, and moved them to the
company's mainframe. He believes that his company has gotten substantial
savings in operational expenses and was was able to retire a number of
older systems. It wasn't necessary to add any additional administrative
or operational staff as part of this transformation.

The other discussed how workloads developed for IBM System/34s were
still in use today even though they had been moved first to an AS/400
and later onto a current system i. We discussed how vital processing
virtualization and storage virtualization can be in extending the life
of mature, but still very valuable, code could be.

Although they've not yet agreed to appear in a customer profile, I
have hopes for presenting a more detailed story about their experiences
in the future.